[metadataLibrarians] dc:title vs. dc:description for images

Mon Aug 30 11:52:14 PDT 2004

Jenn & Sarah:

I agree that having no title is not the end of the world, and in fact I 
think it's often not helpful to downstream users of metadata (not to 
mention end users of the information) to make decisions like this on behalf 
of one project, based on a particular user interface, which then confounds 
or irritates everyone else who uses the data.

In NSDL we oftentimes have metadata that has no title; sometimes we even 
have it with no description AND no title.  Our user interface inserts 
default text in these circumstances which says either [No title available] 
or [No description available].  Our system links to the resource from the 
title, so this default text carries the link if there is no actual title on 
the record.  Because we display primarily the title, description and format 
(and a link to the metadata record), sometimes users are pretty much "on 
their own," but in fact in this world of Google they seem to be able to 
make their own decisions regardless!

Diane Hillmann
National Science Digital Library
Cornell Information Science

At 10:17 AM 8/30/2004 -0500, Sarah L. Shreeves wrote:
>Hi Jenn --
>
>As a service provider we've actually made a point of making some rules 
>about displays and indexing that take into account issues like no titles.
>
>For instance, in our Mellon funded service provider (for cultural heritage 
>materials), we always display the dc:title, dc:creator, and dc:subject or 
>dc:description in our short display. If the dc:title is missing, the 
>dc:subject is displayed. If dc:subject is missing, dc:description is 
>displayed. We also included the title, subject, and description fields in 
>one index.  This decision was made primarily because of the amount of 
>museum (and library, for that matter) metadata no titles. In our study of 
>the use of DC by community (from the Mellon service), we found that 77% of 
>records coming from museums and 66% of records from academic libraries had 
>a title element. On average, records from the museum community had one 
>title entry per record, and those from the library community had about two.
>
>So I think that either Option 1 or Option 2 would work fine. Service 
>providers who are working with non-bibliographic material at least should 
>be accustomed to metadata that doesn't fit the normal mold. This doesn't 
>mean poor quality metadata, of course, just that 'good' metadata doesn't 
>have to have a title field!
>
>BTW, I did see this in the LC American Memory collection, if it helps:
>
>dc:title Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merriles
>dc:description: Title from unverified information on negative sleeve.
>
>Sarah
>
>
>At 12:52 PM 8/28/2004, Riley, Jenn wrote:
>>Hello all-
>>
>>I'm mapping metadata for an archival collection of digitized slides (the
>>collection is at <http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/cushman/>)
>>from our native format to simple DC for exposure via our OAI data
>>provider, and I'm having trouble making a final decision about how to
>>deal with a dc:title vs. dc:description issue.
>>
>>These slides are from a skilled amateur photographer, so they do not
>>have a "title," per se. They do have a very large amount of description
>>however, all provided by the original photographer - a description
>>written on the slide mount, plus similar but not identical descriptions
>>in between 1 and 3 small notebooks accomanying the slides. So we have
>>between 2 and 4 descriptive strings for each image, none of which can be
>>considered to be more authoritative or complete than another. I'm trying
>>to decide whether to put these strings in dc:title or dc:description
>>elements.
>>
>>Option 1: Put all of them in dc:title. This means each DC record will
>>have up to 4 dc:title elements. I'm leaning strongly toward this
>>solution at the moment, mainly because I don't find any of the other
>>options satisfactory.
>>
>>Option 2: Put all of them in dc:description. This is from a pure
>>metadata standpoint the best solution - these strings are all really
>>descriptions, rather than formal titles. However, this would result in
>>NO dc:title element for these records. Since service providers rely so
>>heavily on dc:title for intelligible display of records, I'm extremely
>>hesitant to use this solution.
>>
>>Option 3a: Pick one of the strings to put in dc:title and put the rest
>>in dc:description. If we were to do this, I suppose the description from
>>the slide mount would go in dc:title, since there's only ever 1 of
>>these, but I really don't like this solution. There's no reason to
>>prefer this description over the ones from the notebooks - in fact, the
>>descriptions in the notebooks were written when the picture was taken
>>(the slide mounts obviously were written after the film was developed!)
>>and the notebook descriptions weren't subject to space considerations as
>>the slide mount descriptions were. But there's no reason to pick any of
>>the 3 possible notebook descriptions over any of the others so there's
>>no good way to pick one of them for dc:title either.
>>
>>Option 3b: Pick one of the strings to put in dc:title and put all of
>>them in dc:description. Same as above, but duplicate the value in
>>dc:title in dc:description. I don't like this solution for the same
>>reasons as 3a, above.
>>
>>Option 4: Create a generic title for each record (something like
>>"Charles W. Cushman slide") and put all the descriptive strings in
>>dc:description. Although I'm a librarian and we construct "titles" for
>>unpublished materials all the time, I *really* don't like this solution.
>>There are 15,000 slides in the collection, so if a user's search came up
>>with more than one record from this collection, a display listing titles
>>would be extremely UN-useful. Also, we have a strong commitment in this
>>collection to preserve the photographer's original words, so I'd like to
>>find a way to make these what users see in search results.
>>
>>I do plan to expose at least one other more robust metadata format for
>>these records, so hopefully some service providers will be able to see
>>and maintain the complex nature  of this issue, but I still want to make
>>sure that our simple DC is intelligible for service providers who will
>>only use that metadata format.
>>
>>So does anyone out there have advice on this issue? Is there a pervasive
>>practice out there by service providers to use a dc:description for
>>display when there's no dc:title? What have other data providers done
>>when dealing with unpublished material with multiple possible "titles"?
>>
>>Jenn
>>
>>========================
>>Jenn Riley
>>Metadata Librarian
>>Digital Library Program
>>Indiana University - Bloomington
>>Main Library E170
>>(812) 856-5759
>>www.dlib.indiana.edu
>>
>>========================
>>Jenn Riley
>>Metadata Librarian
>>Digital Library Program
>>Indiana University - Bloomington
>>Main Library E170
>>(812) 856-5759
>>www.dlib.indiana.edu
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